Historically, the only way to get an Amazon Prime subscription was to pay one $79 per year fee. However, Amazon is now offering a monthly Prime subscription at $7.99 per month. To get people to try out Prime, Amazon is even offering up a free one-month trial of the service. After that one-month trial, the Prime membership will cost $7.99 per month.

Perhaps the best thing about the monthly service is that there is no minimum order size to get free two-day shipping on millions of items. The real and often overlooked benefit of Prime is the dirt-cheap next-day shipping. For somewhere around three dollars, you can get your items the next day.

Monthly prime subscribers also get unlimited instant streaming of movies and TV shows with Prime Instant Video and a free Kindle digital book each month from the Kindle Owners Lending Library. Amazon is obviously getting very serious about its streaming video offering with the monthly price of $7.99. It's on par with Netflix and Hulu Plus, with one major benefit over both of those services of having free shipping on all sorts of products sold by Amazon and a free digital book each month.

Needed new tires on my truck. The distributor that my buddy's auto shop works with didn't carry the brand I wanted, so I went online to see if I could find them anywhere nearby.

Lo and behold I find them being sold on Amazon, though whatever 3rd party. So I go and order them to be delivered to the shop...and what pops up but a free offer to try out Amazon Prime for like a month, with free next-day shipping on my current order.

Next-day air. On 4 very large, load range E truck tires.

...sure. Why not? So I accept their free trial offer. And the tires got there the next day. And then I canceled my Prime subscription immediately, because realistically speaking it serves no purpose for me. I occasionally buy stuff from Amazon, but when I do it's fine to wait for normal shipping. And, since like 1 in 5 Americans I live in a rural area (frequently areas with no broadband internet of any kind), streaming movies or downloading any content of any kind is an utterly laughable concept.

I shudder to think what it cost Amazon to ship those tires next-day air...but hey - you offered it, so I took it. Huzzah!

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